With Moonlight quickly approaching its first
official 2.0 release (which has feature parity with
Silverlight 2.0 and has a handful of 3.0 features in place) we
have been thinking about the work ahead of us, 3.0 and beyond.

Although there is much work left to do to achieve full
parity with Silverlight 3.0, a solid 2.0 core means that we
can start thinking about new innovative ideas.

We could use Silverlight to build the next wave of
cross-platform desktop applications.

I think of the Moonlight relationship to Silverlight as the
Firefox relationship to IE four years ago. It is a chance to
try out new ideas in the Silverlight-o-sphere, we can try
those ideas out, and if the ideas have merit, they could become
part of the official Silverlight.

This echoes to some extent
what Bob
Muglia said on an interview a few days ago: "[it] will
allow for Silverlight to move into all sorts of places where
we can't - we can't see."

For example, we are hard at work to make Silverlight run on
the native PlayStation 3 and the Wii.

In any case, we have been working on Moonlight for a long
time. With our security system in place, and both our smooth
streaming media engine and GUI engine in place I feel that
open source innovation can begin.